There were three other, somewhat mismatched, works of SF/F that kept coming to mind as I read this book: American Gods by Niel Gaiman, The Dark Tower series by Stephen King, and Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi. American Gods for the setting: contemporary America, with magic and menace in the mundane. Dark Tower for the inspiration behind the plot: a ka-tet that sought the Tower, failed, and was broken and scattered, coming together to try again. And KPS because it was so obvious that this book was the author’s method of coping with gestures vaguely at everything. (as an aside, Gladstone’s and Scalzi’s respective coping strategies are more or less polar opposites, which doesn’t really surprise me)
To expand on the plot: a group of students from Yale figured out a way to travel to alternate realities, all of which are broken and ruined in various ways (Earth Prime is as good as it gets, which is depressing). They had various adventures that are alluded to, and sought to reach the center of everything where they hope to be able to fix everything. It doesn’t go well, one of them is lost, and the group all goes their separate ways. The main protagonist, the lover of the one who was lost, obsessively continues the work solo. The others all try to find normal lives and forget what they have seen. The story proper kicks off when the main protagonist asks them all to come together to deal with a looming threat.
This was not the easiest book to read. It was hyper-contemporary for the last few years. Covid-19, Donald Trump, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, ICE: none of these are mentioned explicitly, but they all play a big role in the story (one of the group, after they went their separate ways, went on to found a fictional version of Palantir Technologies with all the questionable ethics involved). The overall feel of the world since (approximately) November 2016 is in fact the driving force behind their actions. The group believes that the supernatural “rot” which pervades all the alternate realities is affecting ours as well, making capitalism worse, police more aggressive, people less caring about their neighbors.
Like I said, not a particularly easy book to read. This is about as far from “escapist” as it is possible to get. I’m honestly not sure how to rank this book on a 5-star scale. I didn’t particularly enjoy reading this, but I don’t actually think it was a bad book. I think it was three things that kept me from really liking this. One was how topical it was, for obvious reasons. Two was the language: it’s very densely written, with long, many-claused sentences and metaphorical descriptions. Three: it felt very pretentious in places. A decent portion of the book is giving to poking holes in the pretensions of Yale and its students and alumni, but even so, this felt like a very pretentious work of capital-L Literature in any number of places.